A few detached bones, that bear on their outer surfaces the dermal
markings, must have belonged to that angular-shaped portion of the head
which intervened between the cranial buckler and the intermaxillary bone;
but the key for assigning to them their proper place is still to find;
and I suspect that no amount of skill on the part of the comparative
anatomist will ever qualify him to complete the work of restoration
without it. I have submitted to the reader the cranial bucklers of
_five_ several genera of the ganoids of the Old Red Sandstone; but no
amount of study bestowed on these would enable even the most skilful
ichthyologist to restore a _sixth_; nor is the lateral area of the head,
which was, I find, variously occupied in each genus, less difficult to
restore than the buckler which surmounted it. Two of the more entire of
these dermal bones I have figured (fig. 39, _a_ and _b_) in the hope
of assisting future inquirers, who, were they to pick up all the other
plates, might yet be unable, lacking the figured ones, to complete the
whole. The curiously-shaped plate _a_, represented in its various sides
by the figures 1, 2, 3, is of an acutely angular form in the transverse
section, (the external surface, 1, forming an angle which varies from
thirty to forty-five degrees with the base, 3;) and as it lay, it is
probable when in its original place, immediately under the edge of the
cranial buckler, it may have served to commence the line of deflection
from the flat top of the head to the steep descent of the sides, just
as what are technically termed the _spur_-stones in a gable-head serve
to commence the line of deflection from the vertical outline of the
wall to the inclined line of the roof, or as the spring-stones of an
arch serve to commence the curve. A few internal bones in my possession
are curious, but exceedingly puzzling. The bone _a_, fig. 40, which
resembles a rib, or branchiostegous ray, of one of the ordinary fishes,
formed apparently part of that osseous _style_ which in fishes such as
the haddock and cod we find attached to the suite of shoulder-bones, and
which, according to Cuvier, is the analogue of the coracoidian bone,
and, according to Professor Owen, the analogue of the clavicle. Fig.
_b_ is a mere fragment, broken at both ends, but exhibiting, in a state
of good keeping, lateral expansions, like those of an ancient halbert.
Fig. _c_, 41, which is also a fragment, though a more considerable
one, bears in its thicker and straighter edge a groove like that of an
ichthyodorulite, which, however, the bone itself in no degree resembles.
Fig. _d_ is a flat bone, of a type common in the skeleton of fishes, but
which, in mammals, we find exemplified in but the scapulars. It seems,
like these, to have furnished the base to which some suite of movable
bones was articulated,—in all likelihood that proportion of the carnal
bonelets of the pectoral fins which are attached in the osseous fishes
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